Jackson, Jesse Louis (1941– )

US Democratic politician, cleric, and campaigner for minority rights. He contested his party's 1984 and 1988 presidential nominations in an effort to increase voter registration and to put black issues on the national agenda. He is an eloquent public speaker, and in 1998 emerged as a spiritual adviser to President Bill Clinton. He withdrew from politics indefinitely after it emerged in January 2001 that he had fathered a child during an extramarital affair in 1998.

Born in North Carolina and educated in Chicago, Jackson emerged as a powerful Baptist preacher and black activist politician, working in the mid-1960s with the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, then on building the political machine that encouraged greater voter registration and helped give Chicago a black mayor in 1983. Jackson sought to construct what he called a rainbow coalition of ethnic-minority and socially deprived groups to unite against the right-wing Reagan administration. He took the lead in successfully campaigning for US disinvestment in South Africa in 1986. In 1990 he won election to his first elective office, as ‘shadow senator’ for the District of Columbia.